6i 



which a bough of mistletoe assumes when it has been cut and 

 kept for some months; the bright tint is not confined to the 

 leaves but spreads to the stalks as well, so that the whole branch 

 appears to be indeed a golden bough. A visitor to Brittany says 

 great bunches of mistletoe are hung up in the villages and kept 

 unlil June, "when the leaves become bright yellow." 



In the olden days for Christmas decorations of churches, 

 while holly, bay, rosemary and laurel were favourite plants, the 

 mystic mistletoe was specially excluded, as it was regarded as 

 about as inappropriate to the interior of a church as the celebra- 

 tion of the old Druidical rites within the sacred building. 



Story of G-fievra. 



Although only indirectly connected with the mistletoe, men- 

 tion might be made of a tragic story first published by Rogers, 

 in Italy, in 1822, of a young Italian bride who, playing hide- 

 and-seek, hid herself in a large dower chest, in which she was 

 held a prisoner and died. A similar narrative is given by Collet 

 in his " Relics of Literature." A story of a like character has 

 been current in this country for more than a hundred years, and 

 it has been associated with many country houses in Hampshire 

 and elsewhere. T. Haynes Bayley, who died in 1839, wrote a 

 ballad on the subject called "The Mistletoe Bough." It was set 

 to music by the English composer, Sir Henry R. Bishop. 



One of the houses associated with the story is Marwell Old 

 Hall, near Southampton, once the residerce of the Seymours, and 

 subsequently of the Dacre family. 



Another was Bramshill Park, near Winchfield, the home of 

 the Cope family. 



In neither of these has it been possible to ascertain the 

 truth of the tradition which is common in many countries and 

 mo^t difficult of investigation. 



SOME ANALYSES OF LOCAL WATERS. 



By A. J. TYRRELL, f.c.s. 

 (Read before the Physical Section, March 2nd, 1918.) 



To commence with, it may be an advantage to consider 

 briefly the two different ways in which hardness and other re- 

 sults of analysis are expressed. The old way, and a way still 

 very much in use, is to state quantities as grains in the gallon, 

 which is the same as so many parts in seventy thousand of water. 

 To say that a water has a hardness of 10 degrees, for example, 

 means that it contains 10 grains of calcium carbonate per gallon. 

 In the other mode of stating results, 10 degrees of hardness 

 stands for 10 parts of calcium carbonate, not in a gallon or 

 seventy thousand parts of water, but in 100,000 parts of water. 



